Rewrite Your Identity: From Self-Sabotage to Self-Worth

0:00Ten years ago, I made the decision to build my personal brand that was elevated, yet approachable, and reflected who I was, not just what I did. I created my website with ShowIt because it's true drag-and-drop freedom, so you can easily build and update your site. Plus, their real human support team, game changer. Want to try it for yourself? Head to jasminestar.com forward slash showit for a 14-day free trial and first month free when you subscribe. In today's episode of the Jasmine Starr Show, we're sharing a clip from a powerful conversation with best-selling author and high-performance coach, Lewis Howes.

0:33And this, y 'all, is all about something every entrepreneur wrestles with. Fear. This clip was pulled from Jasmine's full-length podcast interview with Lewis because it gets right to the heart of why so many of us feel stuck and what it really takes to rewrite the stories that are holding us back. This episode is for the dreamer who's tired of overthinking, the doer who still feels like they're not enough, and the leader who's ready to finally stop self-sabotaging and start showing up with confidence. Let's get right into it. So you hit the ground running. On page 20, you said that there's a mindset shift that a person needs to make to actually start moving towards what they want.

1:14So let's start there. Somebody right now is listening and they feel stuck. They could have a business or they're just starting a business. What's the first mindset thing to get out of like, I'm feeling stuck? is to reflect on your identity. And you reflect on your identity through asking a set of questions, but really just paying attention to what you say to yourself consistently and what you say to others consistently. And whatever we add after I am is who we believe we are. And if we could record the narration we have inside of our head on a daily basis and play it to the world, they'd probably put us in a mental institution.

1:52Yeah. Because a lot of us say nasty things about ourselves to ourselves internally and then also to others around us. And if you said these things to your best friend or your partner or your spouse or your mom or dad, they wouldn't want to be in your life. If you spoke to other people the way that we spoke to ourselves. Not everyone does this, but typically a lot of us have a negative identity around how we speak about ourselves. When I was growing up, I used to say all the time, I'm such an idiot. I'm so stupid. I mean, I'm worthless. this, even when I achieved something, it still wasn't good enough, right?

2:24So it was like, ah, but I'm still made that mistake. What a dummy. I would say these words, and I used to, when I was a teenager, physically punch myself in the face and in the head and beat myself up physically. A lot of us just do it emotionally and psychologically and verbally, but I would do it also physically. So for many years, I was driven by an identity that did not serve harmony inside of me. It created external results, but left me feeling inharmonic internally, which again, made me feel I'm not enough. I'm stupid. I'm not worthy, all these things. So this identity drove me, but it also hurt me at the same time.

3:03And 10 years ago, I started the journey of healing, and it's been an ongoing journey. In no way am I still a perfect human being, and I'm a flawed human being that makes mistakes all the time. But over the last 10 years, it's been an incredible journey of awareness, reflection, responsibility, and healing, which has given me so much peace in my heart. I've never felt this much peace and calm. That doesn't mean that there's not challenges, stress, and adversity in my life. But I don't internalize it the way I used to. And 10 years ago, I decided to create a different identity with myself. and before I used to be, I was a fun, loving, pretty happy guy, but there was a wound inside of me, multiple wounds.

3:52And whenever those would get triggered, someone would touch it, boop, someone would cut me off in the street. I get angry. Someone would say something to me on a basketball court. I'd react. You know, someone would get mad at me or say something I didn't like. I'd shut down. So I would get angry and frustrated. I would get in stages of, I wouldn't call it depression, but states of sitting in my apartment for days, not knowing what to do. So I wasn't like depressed thinking I wanted to commit suicide, but I was in depressed emotional states where I was just like, what am I doing? And beating myself up.

4:29And I also would tell myself all the time, man, you're such an idiot. You're so stupid. You're not smart. You're just a dummy. I would say these things internally and externally. So my identity based on my own narrative and my own story was causing a lot of suffering. Ten years ago, I decided to break that identity belief within myself by literally creating a contract with myself, a written contract where I wrote down a new identity and signed it. I had this framed on my wall for a long time. And the contract is still the same today. Instead of being angry, frustrated, depressed states, and dumb, I became a loving, passionate, wise man.

5:14And that is my identity today. Whenever I feel off, whenever I feel frustrated, whenever I feel like I'm having an off day, I lean back into my own personal contract. I am a loving, passionate, wise man. And I had to create a contract that I could actually believe. Not like, you know, something that was completely false, because then I wouldn't be able to believe, and I think that's fake, and it's a false identity. So we have to create an authentic, integrous, congruent identity with self first. And I knew I was loving, but I just had to let go of the anger. I knew I was passionate, but I had to let go of the mental stress and depression that I would cause, that would cause me to be less passionate at times.

5:57And I didn't believe I was smart, so I couldn't put the word smart in my contract, but I did believe I was wise. I believe I had a lot of wisdom and experience. I had gone through a lot of adversity, suffering. I'd done a lot of different things to overcome that created wisdom within me. And wisdom was a word that I could actually step into and embody. I couldn't step into intelligent, smart, high IQ, any of these things because I actually didn't believe that. It's shifted over the last 10 years now, but wisdom was something I couldn't fully embrace and embody. And I create new meaning around the identity.

6:31So I created a contract with myself where, again, I wrote it down. I embodied it. I signed it. And the contract was, I am. A loving, passionate, wise man. And some people call, you can create a mantra for yourself, but this has to be a signed contract with self, something that you agree to. Agreeing to new terms. New commitments, non-negotiable. This is who I am becoming and who I am. Okay, can we pause here for a second? So the you 10 years ago, somebody cut you off, somebody pissed you off on the basketball court, and you had a reaction, and you would get angry or you would shut down. Now, the man that you are today, somebody cuts you off, or people get really tough, or somebody says something that presses on a wound.

7:17What's the reaction in relation to the new contract? Well, I mean, it's rare for me to react. very rare for me to react. Even if someone's doing something that I don't like, I'll just say like, come on, buddy, let's go. You know, someone's like cutting me off. I'm like, come on, buddy. But I'm not reacting from a wound anymore. I'm not reacting from like an impatience or frustration or like someone is abusing me or abandoning me or taking advantage of me, which was my viewpoint on the world that everyone was abusing, abandoning, or taking advantage of, or trying to do something to harm me. Based on my previous memories of all the painful memories that I've ever had, I had to curl back and heal and create new meaning from each memory that caused me to have a wound that was still open.

8:03Because when we react emotionally or mentally, whether it be from anger or frustration, anything that isn't at the highest conscious state, when we react in a different way from a suffering state, a hurt state, a fear state, it's not right or wrong, good or bad. It's just, is that useful and effective to serving a meaningful mission in your season of life right now? And so I start the book with really defining in one sentence, what is the meaning of the mission that you're on for this season? That season could be three months, three years, 10 years. It doesn't matter to me what season you're in, but can you define in one sentence what you're up to right now in your life?

8:42Most people aren't clear in one sentence. For me, it's very clear. To serve and impact 100 million lives weekly, to help them improve the quality of their life. It's clear on the mission. The mechanisms may change. The actions may change, but it's all serving towards a mission. So it's easier for me to make decisions, yes or no, of what energy to put out into the world every day based on will it support and serve this mission? Will it help others? And will it give me energy and peace? How does your mission correlate with the contract? Now, the clarity on the contract, is your contract still the same or over the last decade it's changed?

9:17It's still the same. My contract will never leave. My contract will... Right, but are the terms like the compassionate, loving... I'm a loving, passionate, wise man. Yeah, that's who I am. That's... The contracts stay the same. Yes. And the mission has become what it is. But I've had to learn how to heal. Step one is... I mean, identifying first and facing yourself in the mirror. 10 years ago, right before I created this contract, I looked at myself in the mirror and I didn't recognize myself in a bad way. after I had a pretty bad fight on a basketball court, and I was just having breakdown after breakdown after breakdown in intimate relationships, business partnerships, friendships, and just life.

9:58I was just not showing up the best version of myself. And I remember after this fight I got in, I looked at myself in the mirror, and I was kind of shaking and trembling, and I just didn't recognize who I was. I was creating out of fear, resentment, and anger, not from love, abundance, and empowerment. And I realized, okay, this way of being, this way of thinking got me certain external results and at the same time left me feeling extremely sad, alone, and suffering internally. So it was a false sense of working. It worked in terms of success, I guess, externally, but it's not the way I wanted to feel internally.

10:41So I had to kind of fully look myself in the mirror and say, what are the things that are working and not working? And again, healing is a journey. It's not a one-time moment. It's not like, okay, you're healed overnight once you're aware. It is a journey of facing yourself consistently until your nervous system truly is not triggered by emotional reactions. And I'm not saying don't be prepared if there's a fight or something you got to do to protect yourself. But when it's psychological and emotional triggers. That means there's a wound inside of you that something is poking you, whether you see something on TV or someone says something or someone forgot to do something and it triggers you.

11:21That just means there's a wound inside of you. It doesn't mean you're good or bad, right or wrong. It just means there's something inside of you that is still hurting you. Where did that come from? So I had to face every memory. On my phone for a long time, I don't have it anymore, but on my phone for a long time, I used to have a screensaver. Now I have it of my girlfriend, Martha, but I used to have a screensaver. Was it you as a child? I was a five-year-old, yeah. Yeah, I remember this. He's a five-year-old. I used to have me on my screensaver. This was about two years ago as I really started to dive in deeper.

11:50I started the healing journey 10 years ago and continued to improve, but there were still things inside of me that I was repeating that I wasn't conscious of until a few years ago when I realized, okay, I'm still entering committed relationships that are not aligned with my values, vision, and lifestyle because of a wound. So I had to face myself and ask, why am I repeating and attracting certain types of people? They're not right, wrong, good, or bad. It's just we weren't in alignment. But why am I choosing? And then why am I staying when I know it's not the right thing? What is inside of me that is wounded, that is causing me to abandon self constantly, that is causing me to give in, to please, to buy peace as opposed to being peace, as opposed to aligning myself as peace in every environment.

12:44And that was, you know, six months of intensive therapeutic healing modalities to support me in creating new meaning around other memories from the past that I still hadn't mended. And when we can create new meaning around these little traumas, big traumas, painful memories that we've suppressed for so long or just tried to block or just not think about. And we heal and then we can face those things. Really, it's about the awareness of it and then integrating it as it comes to you. Being able to sit with the uncomfortableness, the frustrations, the pain, the stress, and calming your nervous system in the face of it.

13:24It's not running away. It's not removing yourself from the situation because it's going to keep coming back. So it's learning how to, how do I navigate my emotions when someone is doing something that I don't like or when I'm in a situation that is scary or vulnerable or upsetting or hurtful to me? How can I learn to create new meaning so that my mind and my heart are incoherent? That when this happens in the future, because it will happen again, I can navigate it with harmony and peace. It doesn't mean I have to stay in these situations, but I can navigate it without being so reactive and frustrated and consumed by what other people are doing.

14:03Okay, so we're going to go back to the original question, and I'm going to repeat back what I heard. a distilled version. Somebody's stuck. And I put it in terms of professional, but we could be stuck in familial relationship, finance, business. And first things first was to create a new contract. It's to decide the person you're going to become. And in the process of deciding who you're going to become, if you're experiencing the same pitfalls, the same gaps, the same triggers, there are some work that is to be done. And when you realize, and maybe not everybody has to experience this. Maybe some people are like, the new contract becomes a new contract.

14:39and I haven't gone through enough or different things in my life to affect it so I can move forward. But for those of us like myself who decided just like you, and maybe not in the terms of like a formal contract, but something did happen very similar. And I'm going to decide to become this type of person. And what I experienced is very much what you experienced. A lot of triggers and a lot of depressive states and a lot of what if, and I too had to do the work. So if there are people who are listening and you realize you're stuck and you decide you're going to create a new contract that speaks into the mission and you realize there are similar pitfalls, it's time for us to do the work.

15:10It's time for us to get outside help. Yeah, but it's always time to do the work. What would change in your life if you stopped making decisions based on fear and started choosing from a place of worth? That's the question Lewis left us with, and one that might take time to fully unpack. But if this episode reminded you that your identity isn't fixed, your past does not define your future, and that fear doesn't get the final say, well, then it's already done its job. We'll see you in the next episode of The Jasmine Starr Show.